WikiTaxi offers you an offline snapshot of the Wikipedia. The full English dump is only 3.5GB. (An abridged version is a svelte 25MB.)
Did you ever want to take Wikipedia with you while you are offline? Call on WikiTaxi: It is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go.
WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays reasonably small.
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WikiTaxi is up to date. It works with the original Wikipedia database dumps, which are updated regularly every few weeks or so. If you feel that your offline Wikipedia is getting to old, you can go online to download a more recent version or just copy it from a friend.
Not only is this just simply kewl, but I imagine scholars looking for a way to measure changes in the wikipedia will love this.
One of the nice (and insufficiently celebrated) things about all the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) projects, including Wikipedia, is that they all make themselves available for bulk download free of charge, optionally including all edit histories — a terrific resource for those doing various sorts of statistical analysis, for example. See: http://download.wikimedia.org/. If WMF stopped paying its electric bill tomorrow, somebody else would surely have Wikipedia up and running again off WMF’s own backups within a day.
Although it’s nice to have a way of reading the dumps, I’m not sure how much more useful it is to scholars studying changes. The dumps have always been available (e.g., http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/), and since you would likely be looking for changes in an automated way, rather than via browsing, I’m not sure how much help this would be.
But it is cool that it is available.
Even more cool: a port so that you could use it on your mobile phone offline…